Così i nazisti delusero gli ucraini

Interwar period in East-Central Europe was the time of state and nation-building. Nations re-gained independence (Poland) and the new states emerged (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). The new states experienced common unresolved disputes with national minorities. Evidently Poland, was most affected country where Ukrainians amounted to 15% and Jews to 10% of the population. East Galicia was a Ukrainian (Ruthenian) principality between the 12th and 14th centuries. From the end of the 14th century and until 1772, the region remained included in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the partition of Poland it fell under the Austrian rule until the end of the First World War. During the Austrian period East Galicia was gradually becoming a homeland to three ethno-national groups: Ukrainian, Poles and Jews. By the end of the 19th century the province acquired administrative autonomy and the governance was entrusted to the Poles. It was also the time of the rising Ukrainian national ideation. The end of the 19th century saw Jewish national awakening in East Galicia. Jewish intelligentsia became actively involved in emancipation and acculturation, while the majority of Jewish population remained Yiddish-speaking religious community.

Canadian- American Slavic Studies, 2014

Who were the Ukrainians who participated in the exterminatory violence that swept eastern Galicia following the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941? Records show that they represented diverse political and demographic strata. Those most distant from nationalist roots, however, demonstrated the highest lethality and greatest willingness to serve as disciplined agents of Nazi genocide. The cycles of violence in German-occupied Galicia were far from uniform in character. The victims and German perpetrators alike rarely differentiated among the Ukrainians doing the violence. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) “task groups” first entered Galicia to establish Ukrainian nationalist authority and in Lemberg participated in a few days of blood-letting until disbanded by the SS. A new, better controlled Ukrainian militia likewise proved unreliable except in self-actuated violence, and was disbanded. Finally, in late July 1941 a standing Ukrainian Auxiliary Police force – different in structure, membership, subordination, and motivation – came into being. It participated centrally in the rendering of Lemberg as Judenfrei, as security and civil authorities orchestrated the murder of Lemberg’s 150,000 Jews over the following two years.

BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR WESTERN AFFAIRS, 2020

In early 1945, the eastern front of World War II moved across the Polish border of 1939 as, supported by the 1st and 2nd Polish Army and other forces, the Red Army advanced into the German territories that would be annexed by Poland as soon as the war was over. In the spring of 1945, the Eastern Front reached further towns in today’s Western and Northern Territories. Since 1945, the residents of these areas have celebrated anniversaries of “liberation” on the dates on which fighting to free their respective towns ended. For several years, various new ways of commemorating these events have emerged in the Western and Northern Territories. Some residents are still celebrating “the return to the Motherland”, while others look for new ideas to remember the “Polish takeover”. Faced with numerous myths built around the events of 1945, the local communities are trying to find their own ways to deal with the problematic overtones of the word “liberation.”

The legacy of territorial changes in the treaty of Brest-Litowsk. Polish Eastern Border 1918-1921 (in:) Ostmitteleuropäische Friedensschlüsse zwischen Mittelalter und Gegenwart, ed. by M. Wołoszyn, M. Hardt, Sandstein Verlag, Dresden 2021, 2021

At the time when World War I broke out, the territorial order on the Polish lands was regulated by the provisions of the Congress of Vienna, which had introduced a new security system in Europe. From the moment when the Congress created the Kingdom of Poland in 1815, the eastern border of this autonomous polity was viewed in Europe as the borderland between the Polish lands and Russia. With time, the term "Russian Poland" came to be used in reference to the Polish lands ruled by the Romanov Empire. This name referred only to the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, excluding the areas of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth annexed by Russia in the aftermath of the Partitions of Poland. 1 The political map of Europe before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 differed markedly from the ethnic map. Many nations which had experienced their rebirth in the nineteenth century did not have their own independent states. The Polish people were one of such nations. World War I, in which Poland's partitioners (Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russian) found themselves on opposing sides, brought about deep territorial changes in Eastern Europe. The offensive of the Central Powers in 1915 resulted in their armies seizing Warsaw on 5 August, followed by the occupation of the whole Kingdom of Poland. It was divided into two occupation zones, an Austrian and a German one. The armies of the Central Powers reached the Riga-Dvinsk-Baranavichy-Pinsk-Tarnopol line. 2 Germany and Austria-Hungary's announcement (5 November 1916) of the declaration which promised to reincarnate the Kingdom of Poland was the first genuine step in the process of internationalising the Polish independence cause during World War I. It was also a reflection of the German Empire seizing the initiative and playing an increasingly stronger role in the alliance with Austria-Hungary. 3 The February Revolution, which abolished tsarism, opened up new possibilities of a German expansion in the East. On

Europe-Asia Studies, 2017

This article analyses the historical narrative about the territories annexed by Poland from Germany at the end of World War II. The so-called 'Recovered Territories' were reinterpreted as 'ancient Slavonic lands', which had been unlawfully seized by Germans and only now restored to their rightful owners. The aim was to establish authority over the acquired territories, integrate them with the rest of Poland and build a sense of identity with them. At the same time, scholarship entered into a complex relation with the new communist regime, joined by the common interest of establishing the new Polish-German border. ONE OF THE OUTCOMES OF WORLD WAR II WAS THE CHANGE OF THE Polish-German border: it was shifted westwards and eventually established, by the Potsdam Agreement of 1945, on the lines of the rivers Oder and Lusatian Neisse. Following point 13 of the same agreement, the border change was accompanied by massive resettlements of both German and Polish populations. According to various estimates, between three and seven million Germans were resettled to the British and Soviet occupation zones. 1 In their place came settlers from the Polish so-called Kresy (Eastern borderlands) annexed by the Soviet Union, as well as from central Poland. Additionally, the acquired territories were populated by people coming back from wartime emigration, including those taken to Germany during the war as forced labour; there was also an autochthonous population of Polish and other Slavic ethnicities that stayed behind after the border was moved. The incoming settlers came mostly by their own decision. However, this decision was very often dictated by propaganda and misinformation as to the conditions to be expected after arriving in the west. 1 Difficulties with providing the exact number stem from the chaos of the final stage of the war, with people fleeing from the front areas, being evacuated by the German authorities and coming back, as well as from the fact that so-called 'wild resettlements' were carried out both before and after the official ones, that is the ones sanctioned by the

Austrian History Yearbook, 2021

This article analyzes a collection of narratives concerning the Russian occupation of Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg), the capital of the Austrian Crownland Galicia, between September 1914 and June 1915 in the initial phase of World War I. These narratives were produced and published in Polish and German between 1915, when Lviv was still occupied, and 1935, sixteen years after it had been included in a reborn Poland. One might assume that the relatively uneventful occupation constituted a negligible experience in the context of the dramatic developments of this period: the Great War and the subsequent Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Soviet wars. And yet, memories of the Russian occupation were tenaciously perpetuated and cultivated. In this article I attempt to answer the multipronged question: Why did the occupation attract so much attention, and from whom, and what made its memories survive the subsequent dramatic conflicts and changes of political regimes relatively intact? Hence, my analysis r...